Today, in spite of advanced video conferencing, shared virtual environments, and gaming environments such as Second Life, it is still simply much more efficient to physically travel to remote location for business, scientific or family meetings—even if at a huge environmental, energetic and opportunity cost.

The science and technology developed in BEAMING will for the first time give people a real sense of physically being in a remote location with other people, and vice versa—without actually travelling.

BEAMING is a four year FP7 EU collaborative project which started on Jan 1st 2010.

BEAMING raises a number of ethical and legal issues that are familiar from existing virtual reality and telecommunications technologies.It also raises several novel issues.

As a demonstration of the work carried out during the first year of BEAMING an actress in U Barcelona was beamed to a room at UC London in order to rehearse a scene from Woody Allen's Annie Hall. Local press were invited along to report on the event.

Beaming, a four year collaborative project to develop science and technology to give people a real sense of physically being in a remote location with other people without actually physically travelling, held today its first Plenary Meeting in Barcelona (Spain) hosted by the University of Barcelona and the project coordinator – the R+D company Starlab.